Claire Willett
@clairewillett.bsky.social
Playwright. Chaos Muppet. Raconteuse. The internet’s gay Catholic aunt. Author of the time travel series THE REWIND FILES. Just a Virgo who can’t drive. http://clairewillettwrites.com (she/her) (PDX)
I asked Alice if she was born when Princess Diana died because I genuinely was not sure of the answer
Alice is 10 years younger than me and we often have similar problems
that was 100% what I thought when I was a kid who only knew Truman’s name from “We Didn’t Start the Fire”
just got to Mass for band practice and was greeted with “good morning, Claire! decked out in the Holy Spirit today, I see!”, which I know was a reference to how everyone in the choir was told to wear red for Pentecost but which I like to imagine is also just an energy I give off
the slinky bit genuinely made me laugh so hard and I still think about it
it isn’t anywhere else, but you’re welcome to use it! where are you planning to share it?
as soon as she came out with that lawsuit I was like “well that sure answers the question of whatever happened to Julia Ormond”
Michael Chabon was one of the few people mentioned who came out afterwards and was like “yeah it’s super fucked up that at the time I cared more about getting my movie made than I did about this kid getting a stapler thrown at him”
Yep that’s him
there was a lengthy article a few years that interviewed a number of them and among other things it’s a real indictment of some otherwise beloved Hollywood A-listers who were sitting in his office and witnessed it and didn’t do or say anything to preserve THEIR standing with Rudin
that book is amazing and @moryan.bsky.social is a real one
I think every day of my life about how “the curse of the Best Supporting Actress” became a pop culture joke - women who exploded onto the scene with one huge hit in the 90s or 00’s, then totally dropped off the map - because we never did the math on how many of those were Miramax movies
and of course with sexual assault the maddening thing is the hypocrisy of it all. we care soooo much about not interfering with someone’s potential when it’s like a college rapist on a swimming scholarship, but somehow the potential of women artists assaulted by violent men bears no consideration
that article about Scott Rudin violently abusing his assistants is such a good example. how many people who could have been the NEXT big award-winning producer never got past rung 1 on the ladder, said “fuck this shit” and quit the industry because of him? because it seems like the answer is DOZENS
The myth of the abusive male genius needs to die. There are very few whose contributions to society are really worth being conflicted over in contrast to the abuse they unleashed. I promise you there was a woman or non-binary person or even a decent man around whose art was just as good
it was sort of wild coming to that show later in its run after she was already a huge star because you’re like “hold up, what is a whole-ass Hollywood icon doing playing a cop on a procedural???” but she truly elevates the material
oh he’s a HUGE figure on the speaker circuit in right wing Catholic circles. he can absolutely fill a stadium
oh no I just meant, did Mel recruit him into his fascist antisemitic Catholic brain worms cult, the way he got ol’ Jim Caviezel and ruined “Person of Interest” for me, but maybe I was only mentally linking Shia and Mel because they both have anger issues
well that’s because he wasn’t talking to women, really
that was for the benefit of other shitty men
I loved that article! My sister went to that church when she lived in Oakland so I’ve heard him preach before and he was great
the funny thing about Portland is that all the progressive priests are the old guys. Mine is in his 70s and when they have big priest convocation meetings the only guys who ever have his back on things like LGBTQ rights and social Justice are the others his age. the young guys all have trad vibes 💀
like either you’re here because you’re like “wow this massive corrupt institution has strayed far from the teachings of Jesus and I want to get in there and be part of the cleanup team” or it’s like “I really want to be be a violent misogynist but the Episcopalians won’t let me”
there are exactly two kinds of people who convert to Catholicism as present day adults, knowing all that is publicly known about the church’s rampant fuckery:
either you are here to fuck shit up from the inside to push the church to where it SHOULD be ….. or the fuckery was a feature and not a bug
The Harrison Butker speech is exhibit six thousand for that meme about recent Catholic converts wanting to send everyone to reeducation camps while lifelong Catholics provide shelter to immigrants and the poor.
and then for about 2 weeks it hurt to swallow and the doctor was like “yeah I think you strained a muscle back there”
coughed so hard I could only eat soft foods, absolute garbage
not to like, TMI on main, but I was coughing up tiny amounts of blood at one time (obviously alarming as someone who has read enough Victorian novels to assume that means I’ll be dead by act 3) and the nurse was like “yeah sometimes you cough so hard you burst a couple capillaries in there”
um????
*** NO UNSOLICITED MEDICAL ADVICE PLEASE I SAW A DOCTOR TWICE I AM JUST BITCHING PLEASE DON’T ASK IF I HAVE HEARD OF COVID ***
if I have gone back around the circle somehow and caught this thing from myself AGAIN, I’m absolutely going to walk into the sea
after four weeks of a respiratory virus so brutal that I physically injured myself by coughing so violently, I was FINALLY FEELING BETTER ….. and now I’m on day 2 of waking up in the morning with a faint scratch in my throat and mild sinus congestion, which is exactly how this started a month ago 💀
I think about it all the time
it’s one of my favorite Twitter memories
every time Rudy Giuliani is in the news again for doing something so doomed and chaotic that it feels borderline Wile E. Coyote-coded, I think about @swordsjew.bsky.social sliding into his DMs doing a Plucky 1940s Gal Reporter voice to try and get him to confess some crimes, and I laugh and laugh
I wouldn’t mind so much the general idea of like a weird old man having a toddler’s understanding of how the law works except for the fact that Giuliani is himself quite famously A LAWYER
seems like it would be kind of a big loophole if you could avoid criminal charges simply by not being home when the cops came
I was gonna say, I feel like if this trick actually worked we would see a lot more people trying it
sorry but am I to understand that Rudy went on the lam in order to run out the clock on this but was tweeting photos of himself the whole time? why does this somehow have Ferris Bueller energy
oh my lord what a shitshow
definitely reads like bots, but even if they’re real people, anyone framing it like Anthony Rapp was his sole victim - and therefore by discrediting him you win - is a totally unserious person
multiple allegations dating back to the 90s, come on losers
that’s been one of the things that kept me from feeling like I wanted to commit a whole book’s worth of energy to her; like, is her instinctive empathy and sense of connection to the bigot going to render it impossible for her to really take a stance against their bigotry. she loved her grandfather!
😬😬😬😬😬😬😬😬 oh dear
didn’t get QUITE all the way out of the cult, then
exactly, like you can’t extract all the Phelps grandkids en masse by sitting them down in a classroom with a PowerPoint. you’ve gotta get deep into the emotional shit where all the poison was planted to yank it up at the roots
Jews are for sure on their List™️ so like no matter how much deprogramming she had done by then I have ZERO trouble believing that she was incapable of being normal about it
hopefully she has chilled out since, but like that woman is in for a lifelong Brain Worms Extraction Process, yikes bikes
I went through a long phase where I was devouring every single article I could find by and about Megan Phelps Roper, but I haven’t read her book yet. I am kind of fascinated by the notion that Fred’s impenetrable ideological bunker from which his family had no means of egress was foiled by Twitter